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PART TWO OF TWO
The 9th January 1986 in the mountains of central Córdoba province was stormy. That evening the Gomez family (grandmother, mother and 12-year old son) living in a cottage at Quebrada de la Luna, Charbonier, some ten kms from Capilla del Monte, were playing cards when they "thought they heard the sound of a car approaching the farm in the drive". They stopped to listen. Suddenly a fierce red light penetrated the windows and doors and illuminated the whole dwelling. The son Gabriel was sent to close the shutters. He saw the UFO clearly.
"It was a round thing with these little windows. The red light came from that part, the upper part was clear. After closing the shutters I went to bed but I could see it from the window in my bedroom. The lights were changing constantly, and when they were all turned off I could see that it was a kind of flattened-ball shape with lines of light at the external edges, like fluorescent tubes. My grandma doesn't believe in UFO's but what I saw was not an aircraft and never made a sound."
A cable sent by the TELAM news agency was read out in a radio broadcast and led within a few days to a legion of journalists, ufologists and the merely curious descending upon Capilla del Monte. In 1985 the town had about 400 visitors annually who came to climb Uritorco, nowadays it has an annual influx of 100,000.
The cable stated:
"Capilla del Monte, Córdoba, January 1986.
An enormous UFO whose movements were observed for a period of one hour came down on a slope of one of the hills of Sierra del Pajarillo some 12 kms north-east of Capilla del Monte. The craft, not seen clearly for a time, then rose quickly leaving the vegetation totally burnt over a diameter of 100 metres, as local government secretary Jorge Suarez confirmed to TELAM.
The incident occurred last Thursday 9 January 1986 and was seen by various local inhabitants, one of them a boy of 8 or 9 years who sketched the strange object, giving it a circular form with numerous portholes from which lights of brilliant colours emanated, alternating between white, blue and orange. (My note: The UFO perched on the slope tilted at an angle of about 50º and the boy would therefore have been able to see its profile.)
"According to witness statements, the sighting of the object occurred 2 kms from the Charbonier-Ongamira path, some 6 kms to the right of Ruta Nacional 38, the point where these cross being 8 kms from Capilla del Monte. The zone is known as Sierra del Pajarillo. (My note: Heading eastwards halfway along Ruta 17 at the foot of Uritorco, the slope with the burnt patch is in view about six kms distant to the north. When I last visited the area in 2015 it could still be made out but is gradually disappearing. )
"It was here (at Sierra del Pajarillo) that local inhabitants - three typical hill-dwelling families - saw an immense "machine" losing altitude to then spend about an hour on one of the hillsides which has low, squat vegetation. The observers stood 2 kms away. After making some slow evolutions, it rose up quickly and disappeared into the firmament.
"The astonished witnesses saw the vegetation burning and upon arriving found that the burned patch formed an almost perfect circle of 100 metres diameter....The local government functionary confirmed to TELAM that the vegetation had been burned "from the top down, singed and scorched, over a radius that we measured from the centre..and was found to have a diameter of 100 metres."
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At this point the reader should Google "El misterio del ovni del cerro Pajarillo" and scroll down to the first photograph which shows the UFO landing site. A photo taken from a better angle appears in the bottom photo beside the newspaper cutting "Una pelota achatada."
A later scientific examination of the patch in 1986 revealed that the vegetation was "incinerated" and the ashes covered the upper part of the stones which in that area form the raised terraces of ancient indigenous sown fields. The bushes were not burnt: their trunks were reduced to ash on the side facing the centre of the circle.
On 5 August 1987, a huge mountain fire destroyed all vegetation over thousands of hectares in the zone of El Pajarillo. The conflagration left the roundish patch involved in the incident of 9 January 1986 untouched however. Firemen stated that it appeared the oval had been devoid of oxygen so that the fire could not catch hold: this was known because the animals which died in the oval had suffocated and not burned to death. (The municipal authority issued an official report confirming these facts. The site was later visited by experts from NASA).
Footnote: In league with those authorities who think that the gunnery officer of a warship with all the range-measuring devices at his disposal can confuse a UFO with Venus we note the presence of the influential Argentine daily newspaper La Nación which postulated that it was not a UFO but a military rocket like the one shown in the photograph. Not the smallest fragment of such rocket has ever been found at the site and no military officer has been called to account for firing it, but that remains the semi-official view to satisfy the anti-UFO lobby.
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